SEM or Search Engine Marketing clearly explained

Do you want to increase your company's visibility and get more customers online? Then you should get to know the world of SEM, i.e. Search Engine Marketing, more familiarly, search engine marketing.

What does SEM mean?

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on reaching customers through search engines and especially Google, the world's most used search engine.

With the help of search engine marketing, potential customers can be reached online when they themselves are looking for a product or service, or information about it. This makes SEM an effective means of increasing a company's Google visibility, increasing web traffic and, of course, boosting sales.

Everyone from local service providers to international online stores can benefit from SEM in the form of increased discoverability and customer base.

SEO + SEA = SEM

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, consists of two separate areas, which are SEO, or Search Engine Optimization , and SEA, or keyword advertising . Together, SEO and SEA form SEM, which in practice is a set of ways to increase a company's visibility on Google.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important part of SEM. With the help of SEO, the website's discoverability in Google is improved organically, i.e. without advertising.

This is done by optimizing the company's homepage or online store to be user-friendly for the customer and in line with search engine requirements, which usually means making technical, structural and content changes to the website.

Achieving visibility with SEO usually takes at least a few months, which is why it is a longer-term digital marketing strategy.

However, the results of SEO are often more stable and have a longer impact than those of SEA, because the website has "earned" its place among the first search results of Google in the form of a well-functioning website and high-quality content that benefits the customer.

With the help of properly done optimization, the company can, over time, achieve continuous visibility in search engines and get traffic to the website without using any resources for advertising at any point.

SEA (Search Engine Advertising)

In SEA, i.e. keyword advertising, on the contrary, you pay for advertising space on Google's search results pages. in which case the company's ad appears in the search results before the organic search results.

Advertising is done using the Google Ads tool .

SEA is also an important part of SEM, as it is a very effective way to increase the company's visibility online and quickly get more visitors to the website and/or online store.

Keyword advertising reaches many customers much faster than search engine optimization. With it, it is also possible for the company to be found on the first page of Google with keywords that would otherwise be difficult, slow or unlikely for a website to achieve visibility just by optimizing the site.

SEA can therefore work better than SEO when the targeted keyword has huge searches and competition in the organic search results, or when the website is new.

With SEM, you can reach the right customers at the right time

Done right, SEM is an effective way to increase visibility on Google and reach potential customers at the right time , i.e. when they are ready to buy or when they are looking for information about a product or service.

With the help of SEO, which is a long-term strategy , it is possible to improve the company's discoverability in search engines with targeted keywords and get more visitors to the website without investing a cent in advertising.

With SEA, you get immediate visibility in Google by ranking before organic SEO search results, and you pay the search engine for this.

In order for your company to get the most out of SEM, you should choose the right keywords in both SEO and SEA, create attractive ads , target and optimize campaigns , and optimize your website for search engines and conversions .